Movie Nation

Kevin Hart giveth and Kevin Hart taketh away in “Night School.”

He never seems more generous than when he’s stepping back, taking on the Ice Cube role in “Ride Along,” reacting and playing the straight man for Tiffany Haddish and especially Romany Malco.

And he never seems smaller than when the star and producer insists this interminable, only occasionally tolerable farce about “second chances” goes on and on past its climax to give his character a gratuitous prologue and epilogue to complete his “character arc.”

It isn’t necessary. And it doesn’t help.

Hart mugs and riffs and tries to wring a giggle out of the five-handed script that still needed work. Scenes go on past their payoff, gags are flogged to death after the punch line. Haddish hurts herself attempting to share the heavy lifting. When you’re repeating your catch phrase from “Girls Trip,” you know girlfriend has run through her repertoire.

“Booty hole!”

Teddy Walters (Hart) ends up in “Night School” because he didn’t finish high school. His no-nonsense dad (Keith David, hilariously profane) knew he was in trouble before Teddy blew the proficiency test required for graduation.

“I’m gonna succeed in the SCHOOL OF LIFE!” Teddy declares, storming out.

And he does. Selling is his calling, and he’s cock of the walk at Atlanta’s Joe’s BBQ City. He’s willing to be called “My own little Gary Coleman” if it means the owner leaves the running of the business to him when he retires.

He’s driving a Porsche and dating WAY out of his league and height (Megalyn Echikunwoke). Then he screws it all up.

He can join his high school buddy (Ben Schwartz) in financial planning (stock and annuities) if he can just swing a GED. He’ll just sweet-talk/sell himself to the principal at his old high school…

No dice. The “smart kid” he hated (Taran Killam) is now principal, and he’s “a principal with principles!” And that mouthy woman he bickered with in traffic, the one who called him “a burnt leprechaun?” She’s Carrie (Haddish), the night school teacher.

“No short cuts!”

Thus is Teddy with his collection of learning disorders thrust into a class with a Mexican waiter he got fired (Al Madrigal, flirting with stereotyping), a Molly-moving punk (Anne Winters), a dimwitted mover (Rob Riggles), an inmate in prison (Jacob Batalon) taking the class via Skype, a downtrodden but “blessed” housewife (Mary Lynn Rajskub) and a bottling plant layoff who came to realize “The Terminator” wasn’t just a movie, “it was PROPHECY!”

Jalen (Malco, of “Weeds” and “The 40 Year Old Virgin”) declares “the revolution will NOT be roboticized!” And every damn line out of his mouth is funny. Malco all but steals the picture, giving advice — “If you’re lying WITH her don’t lie TO her” — making even the lamest running gag catch-phrase funny.

“THAT’s what’s up.”

Romany Malco crushes it.

The best efforts of the rest of the cast don’t add up to more than a random good joke here — teacher telling Ms. “Blessed,” “Aww, look at you, all cute and makin’ America ‘Great Again.'” — and Hart sight gags. Teddy has to wear a chicken costume “marketing” a Christian Fried Chicken joint’s menu to passing traffic — “It’s chicken from THE LORD!”

It’s probably not worth going after this movie for Teacher Haddish’s solution to Teddy’s dyslexia and dyscalculia (inability to comprehend math). She takes him into the MMA hexagon at a local gym, quizzes him and screams “FOCUS” as she pummels him every time he gives the wrong answer.

I don’t think that medical or school board approved.

But Haddish’s profane high school teacher who butchers the Queen’s English is something of a stretch from the start. It’s a make-or-break autumn for her, with three movies coming out. Maybe that’s why she’s run out of fresh material already. I kept seeing the late LaWanda Page of “Sanford & Son,” in her increasingly broad, desperately lowbrow shtick this time out.

It’s Hart’s party, though, and even if the strain and effort shows, he works up a sweat to give the people what we want – making face and overreaching for much of “Night School’s” nearly-two hours.

But the funniest single moment might be a busted take. The Christian Chicken crew is holding hands for their AM prayer, and Teddy twitches and twists and kvetches about how tightly the little old lady cook is holding his. Look at the extra playing the cook. She’s fighting a losing battle with cracking up.

If only we could share her joy.

MPAA Rating:PG – 13 for crude and sexual content throughout, language, some drug references and violence

Cast: Kevin Hart, Tiffany Haddish, Keith David, Taran Killum, Anne Winters, Romany Malco, Rob Riggles

Credits:Directed by Malcolm D. Lee, script by Kevin Hart, Harry Ratchford, Joey Wells, Nicholas Stoller, John Hamburg . A Universal release.

Running time: 1:51

Two striking things stand out about the meticulously realized 19th century in Craig William Macneill’s film, “Lizzie,” about the infamous Lizzie Borden ax murders in Fall River, Massachusetts.

One is the surreal quiet that a world before telephones, electronic gadgets and non-stop media. Even without the distractions, family communication or any communication at all could be a strained, tricky thing.

And the other detail is the presence of axes. In a world where wood was still the main heating source and where home butchering of chickens was the norm, every house had axes everywhere.

The recent book, “The Man from the Train” investigated a possible late 19th century serial killer who generally did his victims in with an ax, and chose to storm into houses near train stations.

But even without that probable murder’s total, ax murders were far from a rare thing, even before Lizzie Borden allegedly “took an ax and gave her Mother” you-know-the-rest.

Macneill (“The Boy” was his) working from a Bryce Kass script, gives us tame-until-it-is-shocking film, glacially slow even as it makes that fateful turn we all know is coming. The Borden House is a seemingly serene setting fraught with tensions unseen and rarely expressed. The upper class Bordens, in this telling, are a family with secrets, motives and deep-seeded grudges.

And then a new maid (Kristen Stewart) shows up. Poor Bridget, Irish and labeled “Maggie” by the Irish-hating lady of the house (Fiona Shaw) has no idea what she’s let herself in for.

Father (Jamey Sheridan) is married to his second wife, a wealthy real estate speculator with a stern way with his two spinster daughters. Emma (Kim Dickens) stoically bears it. Lizzie (Chlöe Sevigny) doesn’t.

Father lectures her on attending the theater by herself, her “wanton displays” being “a public spectacle” (Lizzie has seizures) are “not helping your cause.” She is drifting past marriage age, and cavalier about it, further infuriating him.

But maybe she just hasn’t met Miss Right.

She asks for Bridget’s “proper name,” wonders if she can read and proceeds to take an interest in teaching her. Lizzie can hold her own with the sniping socialites she meets in public, and wears her father down in the simpler battle of wills.

Her bigger concern is what happens when he’s gone — not just his estate, but her own status. In a creaky, dead-silent wood frame house, there are no real secrets. The word “institutionalization” pops up.

And creepy Uncle John (Denis OHare, vulpine and stubbly) is sticking his nose in things, like Dad’s will.

The script frames this story as a flashback, telling us what happened in the months leading up to August 4, 1892. Macneill slow-walks us toward Lizzie’s date with destiny, and the speculative love affair that the film suggests was part of the day’s intrigues.

Stewart keeps Bridget passive, averting her eyes, always conscious of her place. It’s a compact performance, loneliness and powerlessness (Old Man Borden is a creeper) playing into her connection with Lizzie.

Sheridan is properly repressed, cruel and imperious, the “man in his castle” who probably has made many enemies with his real-estate dealings — somebody is sending threatening notes — “Your sin will kill you…The end is near.”

Sevigny’s Borden is altogether too colorless here to be a dazzling villain or victim, depending on how you want to interpret events. Her repressed defiance is more passive than steely and doesn’t completely come off, as Lizzie seems everything her doctor, father, stepmother and uncle believe — naive, highly strung, overconfident of her own cunning. She can be bullied, but she is a poor judge of when she can’t. She stages a stupidly obvious burglary at one point, desperate to secure funds to escape being put away.

Decades of horror cinema behind us, and the nature of the crime — here given a lurid twist by following one theory of how no blood was on the alleged killer’s clothes — still has the power to stun in their violence.

Macneill may impress us with his patience, the chilling quiet of it all, the occasional furtive camera placement capturing the beginnings of a lifeboat romance, two lost souls struggling to hang on to each other in a hell house in Fall River.

Mainly though, he underwhelms. The casting seems right, the pacing washes out the overbearing nature of these lives and waters down the motivations this script seems intent on providing.

It’s a hard sell, that “they have it coming.” Because as Eastwood’s soul-scorched bad man Bill Munny in taught us in “Unforgiven,” “We ALL do.” But nobody short of the most inhuman of human monsters deserved this.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and grisly images, nudity, a scene of sexuality and some language

Cast: Kristen Stewart, Chlöe Sevigny, Fiona Shaw, Jamey Sheridan, Kim Dickens

Credits:Directed by Craig William Macneill , script by Bryce Kass. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:43

Great to see Danny T get  a Western.

Always good to see Lou Diamond Phillips and Jason Patric on the screen.

The actual “stars,” including director Scott Martin, are younger and far less known. Christoph Sanders has TV’s “Last Man Standing” in his credits. Clint Hummel’s  got production designer credits.

Martin? Mostly producing credits, the odd B-movie (“Battle Force”). Doesn’t mean “Big Kill” can’t be a good one. Does suggest maybe it won’t be.

“55 Steps” almost certainly started life with “Oscar bait” in its pitch. Getting a digital release ahead of theatrical kind of tosses that out the window.

Helena Bonham Carter as “we’ve never seen her for,” a mental patient whose test case results in rights for others, with two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank (HBC should have one by now) as the lawyer who fought for her in court.

Bille August directed this Oct./Nov. release. 

Boy, LOOK at the way they bury Jeffrey Tambor in this trailer.

Kevin Hart and Tiffany Haddish co-star in this comedy, and with the way audiences treat comics as if they have expiration dates, there’s no telling how well this will do, even if it’s great. And the trailers aren’t selling that, thus the “stunt” in this one.

Hart’s had a great, long run, a Will Ferrell not Adam Sandler (where you see the comic stop caring, right there on screen) career arc. He leaves it all up there, and much respect for that. No phoning it. Yet.

Haddish? She has three films out this fall. If she’s burning through her 15 minutes, it’s going to happen with one or more of these three. “Girls Trip Sequel” in the works, a cable series she’s mad about being underpaid for, over-exposed for the sort of comic she is.

It has five credited screenwriters and a 1:51 running time, long for a comedy.

But I’m looking for laughs from these two and hoping for the best from “Night School.”

The desperation is palpable, the pitfalls predictable and the road rough in “Roxanne Roxanne,” one rapper’s rise during the early years of New York hip hop.

Michael Larnell’s flinty and uplifting film of the early days of Lolita “Roxanne Shanté” Gooden, the Queen of Queensbridge, a mid-80s fury who became a years-in-the-making “overnight success” and role model, lives on grit and heart and some terrific performances by Chanté Adams, Nia Long and Oscar winner Mahershala Ali.

It started early — VERY early — with little best friend Ranita (Olivia Bucknor) hyping street battle tween Shante (Taliyah Whitaker) with “The CHAMP is here, the CHAMP is here.”

Shante’s already a local legend, brushing off challengers and dismissing pretenders at will, demanding more and more just to participate in these one-on-one rhyme-offs.

Her mom (Long, in her fiercest role in years and best performance in ages) is strict and protective, counting that cash money when it comes in, saving for the day they can get out of The Projects.

Then her man (Curtiss Cook) skeedaddles with her savings (cliche alert), Mom crawls into a bottle and teen Shante’ (newcomer Chante’ Adams) is just hustling (shoplifting for hire) and battling just to keep her and her three little sisters afloat.

“If you touch me…I won’t rest ’til you in a grave or hearse. You the worst and this is LADIES first.

“I’m the best and I don’t care what the rest think…I ain’t rhymin’ no more cuz your breath stink.”

Her big break is an offhand track (“Roxanne Roxanne”) for a neighbor (Kevin Phillips) with a bedroom recording set-up, and “Roxanne Shante'” is born, fame and fortune hers for the taking.

Except it isn’t. Larnell takes us deeper and deeper into the dark side. And booze hound or not, her mother saw it coming, warned her even as she was giving her “the only braces in the projects.”

Man after man lets her down, assaults her, steals from her. And bitter Mom, gossiping with the other single moms of the projects, knows that girls have to learn “to be disappointed by a man at an early age.”

“Take this as a lesson,” she says when the girls wait for an Easter Sunday pickup from their absentee father. “This is what happens when you think they love you and they don’t.”

Shante’ gets on the radio, and suddenly dubious older men pf every stripe are courting her favor. They’re all gifts of bling and promises, “I got you. “I’m always gonna be right there.” “Can I be your man?” “You gonna need protection.”

We hope she’s keeping a wary eye for the dangerous ones, a dismissive snort to the inept ones. But she’s green.

Ali, showing the same cagey blend of good-bad man that won him the Oscar for “Moonlight,” comes on smooth, sentimental and absurdly inappropriate. He talks about wanting “family” in his life, but he’s just another brutalizing pimp — the meanest among many.

Shante”s already been assaulted and cheated — she’s 16. She can’t see it.

Larnell lets us have the uplift of “You’re on the RADIO!” and sudden, hard-earned glory. Club bouncers demand, “Lemme see your teeth.” Can’t have that damned kid with the braces in here wrecking our rap battles.

He has Long carry the comic weight, a woman determined to have something better for her kids even as life derails her hopes. Those braces cost money.

“Get your damn thumb out of your mouth.”

The journey may be an over-familiar one, the tale of a “somebody you don’t know, but you should” if you love hip hop.

Props to Ali for and Long signing on to get it made, and a tip of the hat to Netflix for grabbing a story — even a worn one — about a population underserved by cinema.

And Ms. Adams? We’re all going to be keeping an eye on you.

MPAA Rating: TV:MA

Cast: Chanté Adams, Nia Long, Mahershala Ali, Taliyah Whitaker

Credits: Written and directed by Michael Larnell. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

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With all the emphasis we put on “plot” in the movies, novelty in the setting, situations and obsessions of the characters, it’s a shame when a comedy comes along that can’t make the most of a good one.

Record collecting is a tried and true movie character’s obsession. Blues history, with its “deal with the Devil” mythology, is has been fertile ground since Ralph Macchio was the Blues Kid in “Crossroads,” way back in the last millennium.

So there’s promise in the set-up, the situations and the characters of “Chasing the Blues,” an indie variation on a “Crossroads” theme. Good ideas are frittered away in the execution and the casting, not all of which can be attributed to “They didn’t have the money to do it right.”

It’s a period piece set in three periods. In the 2007 “present,) an Illinois prison inmate, played by former child actor Grant Rosenmeyer (TV’s “Oliver Beene”) is finishing up his twenty year or so sentence when he’s visiting by a drawling, smarmy Southern lawyer (Jon Lovitz). Lawyer Groome is from outside of Baton Rouge, and he has this record collection a dead client had in storage that Alan (Rosenmeyer) might be interested in.

It seems Alan’s in prison for something to do with his mania for rare blues records, way back in TV’s “L.A. Law” era.

The suggestion is, Alan never got over that. The movie’s silliest conceit is, Alan has to be 40something, because he is presented as a high school teacher in that fictive past — the 1980s.

Alan has to get out of the joint, get on a bus and meet a pretty and smart-assed young singer-guitarist (Chelsea Tavares of TV’s “Just Jordan” and “Unfabulous”). For some reason, she’s into guys with prison allegedly written all over their faces (and dated wardrobe).

“I’m gonna tell you a really good story,” Alan says, eventually. Actually, it’s two stories interconnected, and “really good” is actually not an inaccurate description.

He takes us back to his teaching/collecting days, and his youthful search for record collecting’s Holy Grail — the never-released Jimmy Kane Baldwin recording of “Death Where is Thy Sting?”

Don’t Google the song or Jimmy Kane B. They made it up.

Back in 1938, Baldwin cut this shellac 78 at Chicago’s Cicero Records (“SNL” vet Tim Kazurinsky is the recording engineer) while he was on the run from the law in Mississippi. Seems he’d murdered his woman before fleeing north.

They cut four takes of the tune, but when they finally play it back for Baldwin, he flips out. He hears screams in the background, the cries of his dying beloved. The legend is, “Only people with murder in their hearts can hear it.” And if they do, they die.

Alan, whose only references to his own crime are “I didn’t do it,” stumbled across the record in an old lady’s collection back in the 1980s. Trouble was, Alan wasn’t the only guy “tipped” about Mrs. Walker’s (Anna Maria Horsford) huge stash.

Ronald L. Conner of Showtime’s “The Chi” is Paul, owner of the neighborhood Blues Island record store. He is Alan’s nemesis and the life of the movie. Their 1980s “war” over this priceless, legendary recording dominates “Chasing the Blues, gives it what life it has, and its funniest situations and lines.

Because these two are blood rivals. Paul is not just a competitor, poaching Alan’s tips, trying to foil him at every turn.

“You collect to keep OTHER people from having it,” he says. “You hate the fact that you can’t FEEL the music.”

Yeah, he’s playing the race card. No, “cultural appropriation” wasn’t in common use back then.

Alan? He’s not hearing it. He’s an aficionado, a historian and Mr. Jheri Curls doesn’t know how many times Alan has to school the Philistines who feed him (paid) tips about record hoards.

Are you into Led Zeppelin at all?

“More into Lead BELLY.”

“A blues snob is an oxymoron! ” Paul shouts, because Paul has all the best lines. “A WHITE blues snob just a moron!”

They stumble into elderly Mrs. Walker’s apartment in the middle of a heat wave, and wait. And wait some more. She’s got to hear from her son from Down South before disposing of her late husband’s collection.

Steve Guttenberg shows up as one of Alan’s music-collecting confidantes. It’s a pity writer-director Scott Smith didn’t dig deeper into this subculture, because a lot of people dabble in collecting and a lot more are intrigued by it.

Nothing save for this middle-acts war of wills is properly developed, and while it’s fun, the inevitable return to the fictive present lets all the air out of the balloon. Smith contorted his film to shoehorn young Rosenmeyer (a younger, less interesting Shia LaBeouf) into the part.

The ungainliness of this shoehorning is obvious in all these scenes between Rosenmeyer and Tavares. There’s a little chemistry, but there’s supposed to be this much larger age difference than the casting makes clear. So. Ick.

Better to park somebody older in the lead role and a 30-40ish folkie as leading lady to underline the years sacrificed to this fool’s errand, the life it has scarred. Just making Alan a teen as the collector who then does time (shorter time) for an “I didn’t do it” crime connected with the record would have worked. Alan doesn’t need to be a teacher. He probably does need to be more charismatic than Rosenmeyer.

The ending feels like an abrupt afterthought, unsatisfying as well as illogical. The “names” in the cast don’t have enough to do, save for Conner.

There’s a movie in “Chasing the Blues,” just not the movie Smith got out of it.

MPAA Rating: gun violence, profanity

Cast:  Grant Rosenmeyer, Ronald L. Conner, Chelsea Tavares ,Jon Lovitz, Steve Guttenberg

Credits:Directed by Scott Smith, script by Scott Smith, Kevin Guilfoile. A Fulton Market release.

Running time: 1:18

Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, the Brit-Sri Lankan rapper, designer and filmmaker known M.I.A., is even more fascinating as a person than she is as an artist.

Daughter of a leader of the Tamil Tigers, an ethnic Sri Lankan minority that started a civil war to win civil rights, a war that devolved into terrorism against civilians and a defeat the U.N. and much of the world acknowledged turned into genocide, she is outspokenly political, distinctly South Asian in dress, music influences and dance. She took global pop culture by storm in the mid-2000s, earning Grammy and Oscar nominations (a song in “Slumdog Millionaire”), status as “the only Tamil in the Western media” and a place at a Super Bowl Halftime Show, where she flipped off America and was sued by the NFL for it.

Performing with Madonna, dueting with XTina, Bjork/Madonna/Timbaland and Missy Elliot-influenced, she had me at “flipped off the NFL.”

Her British art school/film school mate Stephen Loveridge shadowed her, filmed her and collaborated with “Maya” on “Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.,” a quick-take career, personal life and activism and art documentary about the now-40something global icon.

It plays like a self-portrait — arriving in Britain at 10 with her mother and siblings, fleeing the civil war her father is fighting, dancing (“Music was my medicine.”), dealing with racism (If you’re brown, “you’re a Paki.”), art school where she learned to make documentaries, and then the fateful backstage meeting with Justine Frischmann at an Elastica concert.

That was Maya’s entre’ to the music business, filming the band and directing videos. But she looked at the crowds Elastica was pulling, saw their “access to a microphone,” and wondered, “Why don’t you SAY something?”

Hearing hip hop beats had turned her own ears to America and rap. When she mixed her own music and cooked up her own rhymes, the singing had an immigrant’s ear for Cockney filtered through Missy Elliott’s under-enunciation — vocals as bleeting sound and beat. The music and dance that accompanied it? Distinctly, defiantly South Asian.

And as her fame and power grew, return visits to Sri Lanka radicalized her even as she was making music videos there, Third World flavor with a hip hop beat. Something about her story, her politics and her only-one-of-her-kind looks clicked, and next thing you know she’s at Coachella, in Lollapalooza, a sea of American white kids fist-pumping her act.

Her style, smart outspokenness, controlling her image and art, are a wonder to behold. Directing videos for herself and others, co-writing with Madonna and others, endless magazine covers, her music in every hip film or TV show, “album of the year” and “artist of the decade” honors from Rolling Stone — being into M.I.A. was the in-thing to be.

And then controversy — her politics dismissed (Bill Maher) or edited out of interviews (CNN), her metaphoric videos about the Tamil genocide yanked from Youtube, a sloppy, ethically suspect hatchet-job profile by Lynn Hirschberg in The New York Times Sunday Magazine. A lot of stuff led up to the big flip-off moment, we can see.

And if the champion of the poor and oppressed couldn’t see how hooking up with a famous producer (Diplo) who then made her career, and taking up with another of the Seagrams-rich Bronfmans looked, maybe she isn’t as smart as we think.

Odd tunes waft through the background, music she hears which others are playing on their boom boxes in her London flat, in Sri Lanka — Kenny Rogers’ “Lucille,” Dylan’s “Mozambique.” Real musicians are awash in music, almost drowning in influences.

Loveridge is there for the aftermath of the Super Bowl (a cell-phone recorded not-quite-confrontation backstage, a BIG laugh back in the hotel suite), the lawsuit (settled)  — “OK, we’ve done THAT.”

It’s sad to see she’s soured on America, where as the song says, “every generation throws a hero up the pop charts,” which we in the media then chip away at and tear down.

She’s over 40 and a single mom, her cause has had to morph into something less specific than a genocide that, as she marvels, is quickly put in the past (a New York Times travel piece on “hot vacation spots” lists post-civil war Sri Lanka and sets her off).

But self-aggrandizing hagiography that it is, “Matangi/Maya/M.I.A.” leaves you wondering where her ever-evolving (Industrial, lyrical reggae blues rock rap?) music will take her next, and how she’ll channel her fame in the future, and even if that fame will last past her white-hot notoriety.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: M.I.A. (Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam ), Diplo, Bill Maher

Credits:Directed by Stephen Loveridge. A Cinereach release.

Running time: 1:32

The trailer has hints of “Crossroads,” that Ralph Macchio/Walter Hill classic about looking for a lost Robert Johnson blue classic.

This is about that preoccupation of hedonistic hipsters, vinyl collecting. And it looks cute. Opens in Oct.

Vita Sackville-West was upper class, pronounced “kloss,” to the core, a celebrated socialite and successful author.

Virginia Woolf was a legend in the making, one of the great writers of the 20th century.

Period piece. Torrid gay romance. “Vita & Virginia” touches all the “awards season” bases.

Gemma Arterton, Elizabeth Debecki, Rupert Penry-Jones (The most English name…ever?) and Isabella Rossellini star in this ever-so-posh pic, due out before year’s end in the UK, probably 2019 in North America.